Special Delivery
~ CAN STIll remember the excitement, back in 1957, when Russia launched
the first artificial satellites and managed to hang a few pounds of
instruments up here above the atmosphere. Of course, I was only a kid
at the time, but I went out in the evening like everyone else, trying
to spot those little magnesium spheres as they zipped through the
twilight sky hundreds of miles above my head. It's strange to think
that some of them are still there but that now they're below me, and
I'd have to look down toward Earth if I wanted to see them.... Yes, a
lot has happened in the last forty years, and sometimes I'm afraid that
you people down on Earth take the space stations for granted,
forgetting the skill and science and courage that went to make them.
How often do you stop to think that all your long-distance phone calls,
and most of your TV programs, are routed through one or the other of
the satellites! And how often do you give any credit to the
meteorologists up here for the fact that weather forecasts are no
longer the joke they were to our grandfathers, but are dead accurate
ninety-nine per cent of the time?
It was a rugged life, back in the seventies, when I went up to work on
the outer stations. They were being rushed into operation to open up
the millions of new TV and radio circuits which would be available as
soon as we had transmitters out in space that could beam programs to
anywhere on the globe.
The first artificial satellites had been very close to Earth but the
three stations forming the great triangle of the Relay Chain had to be
twenty-two thousand miles up, spaced equally around the equator. At
this altitude and at no other they would take exactly a day to go
around their orbit, and so would stay poised forever over the same spot
on the turning Earth.
In my time I've worked on all three of the stations, but my first tour
of duty was aboard Relay Two. That's almost exactly over Entebbe,
Uganda, and provides service for Europe, Africa, and most of Asia.
Today it's a huge structure hundreds of yards across, beaming thousands
of simultaneous programs down to the hemisphere beneath it as it
carries the radio traffic of half the world. But when I saw it for the
first time from the port of the ferry rocket that carried me up to
orbit, it looked like a junk pile adrift in space. Prefabricated parts
were floating around in hopeless confusion, and it seemed impossible
that any order could ever emerge from this chaos.
Accommodation for the technical staff and assembling crews was
primitive, consisting of a few unserviceable ferry rockets that had
been stripped of everything except air purifiers.
"The Hulks," we christened them; each man had just enough room for
himself and a couple of cubic feet of personal belongings. There was a
fine irony in the fact that we were living in the midst of infinite
space and hadn't room to swing a cat.
It was a great day when we heard that the first pressurized living
quarters were on their way up to us complete with needle jet shower
baths that would operate even here, where water like everything else
had no weight. Unless you've lived aboard an overcrowded spaceship,
you won't appreciate what that meant. We could throw away our damp
sponges and feel really clean at last.... Nor were the showers the only
luxury promised us. On the way up from Earth was an inflatable lounge
spacious enough to hold no fewer than eight people, a microfilm
library, a magnetic billiard table, lightweight chess sets, and similar
novelties for bored spacemen. The very thought of all these comforts
made our cramped life in the Hulks seem quite unendurable, even though
we were being paid about a thousand dollars a week to endure it.
Starting from the Second Refueling Zone, two thousand miles above
Earth, the eagerly awaited ferry rocket would take about six hours to
climb up to us with its precious cargo. I was off duty at the time,
and stationed myself at the telescope where I'd spent most of my scanty
leisure. It was impossible to grow tired of exploring the great world
hanging there in space beside us; with the highest power of the
telescope, one seemed to be only a few miles above the surface. When
there were no clouds and the seeing was good, objects the size of a
small house were easily visible. I had never been to Africa, but I
grew to know it well while I was off duty in Station Two. You may not
believe this, but I've often spotted elephants moving across the
plains, and the immense herds of zebras and antelopes were easy to see
as they flowed back and forth like living tides on the great
reservations.
But my favorite spectacle was the dawn coming up over the mountains in
the heart of the continent. The line of sunlight would come sweeping
across the Indian Ocean, and the new day would extinguish the tiny,
twinkling galaxies of the cities shining in the darkness below me. Long
before the sun had reached the lowlands around them, the peaks of
Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya would be blazing in the dawn, brilliant
stars still surrounded by the night. As the sun rose higher, the day
would march swiftly down their slopes and the valleys would fill with
light. Earth would then be at its first quarter, waxing toward full.
Twelve hours later, I would see the reverse process as the same
mountains caught the last rays of the setting sun. They would blaze
for a little while in the narrow belt of twilight; then Earth would
spin into darkness, and night would fall upon Africa.
It was not the beauty of the terrestrial globe I was concerned with
now. Indeed, I was not even booking at Earth, but at the fierce
blue-white star high above the western edge of the planet's disk.
The automatic freighter was eclipsed in earth shadow; what I was seeing
was the incandescent flare of its rockets as they drove it up on its
twenty-thousand-mile climb.
I had watched ships ascending to us so often that I knew every stage of
their maneuver by heart.
So when the rockets didn't wink out, but continued to burn steadily, I
knew within seconds that something was wrong. In sick, helpless fury I
watched all our 10nged-for comforts and, worse still, our mail! moving
faster and faster along the unintended orbit. The freighter's
autopilot had jammed; had there been a human pilot aboard, he could
have overridden the controls and cut the motor, but now all the fuel
that should have driven the ferry on its two-way trip was being burned
in one continuous blast of power.
By the time the fuel tanks had emptied, and that distant star had
flickered and died in the field of my telescope, the tracking stations
had confirmed what I already knew. The freighter was moving far too
fast for Earth's gravity to recapture it indeed, it was heading into
the cosmic wilderness beyond Pluto.... It took a long time for morale
to recover, and it only made matters worse when someone in the
computing section worked out the future history of our errant
freighter. You see, nothing is ever really lost in space. Once you've
calculated its orbit, you know where it is until the end of eternity.
As we watched our lounge, our library, our games, our mail receding to
the far horizons of the solar system, we knew that it would all come
back one day in perfect condition. If we have a ship standing by it
will be easy to intercept it the second time it comes around the
sun~uite early in the spring of the year A.D. 15,862.